Invercargill-Bluff rail history published
A book about a significant, and at times notorious, piece of Southland’s rail history will be launched in Bluff this weekend.
The Invercargill-Bluff Railway and Bluff School Train, by Alex Glennie, draws from a wealth of public record – including outraged headlines – and gleeful-to-rueful reminiscences.
The railway was an important piece of social and transport history for several reasons but the school train was particularly famed, if that’s the word, for what could charitably be called the rumbunctious behaviour of its occupants.
Glennie said there was never any intention to profit personally from the publication and any profits would go to the Southland High School Old Boys’ Association to create a memorial of the only child to have died on the journey, Francis Kipling Dixon, in 1917. A tragedy, Glennie was quick to add, that did not stem from bad behaviour. Just a slip and a fall.
It was meeting the boy’s relatives that had really given him the impetus to finish what had been a longstanding research project;.
He had not treated the book as a chance to exercise his own writing style and opinions. It was more a case of editing and compiling in a way that let history tell itself.
The book will be launched at the Bluff marae on Sunday October 28 and copies can be obtained from the Otatara-based author and through the Bluff library.